A hilariously awkward road trip begins when Steve Coogan can’t entice anyone but frenemy/fellow actor Rob Brydon to tag along on a plum travel writing gig. Stuck with each other—and worse, virtually no audience—they compete with dueling impressions, unsubtle oneupmanship and shameless bids for attention, in a brilliant riff on celebrity, insecurity and friendship.

HOW TO BE A WINNER

1) Put "The Trip @ The IFC Center" in the subject line of an email addressed to theapiary@gmail.com and send it by end of day Thursday (6/9)

2) If you win, tell your friends via your blog or FB status that The Apiary made you a winner -- it's so easy!

Two winners will be selected at random to receive a pair of passes--you'll be notified on Friday if you're one of them. Passes are good for any screening of the film next week at the IFC Center in New York. You should live in NY if you're going to enter!

Sketchfest NYC returns for its 7th spectacular year and it all begins tomorrow. The Apiary will be RIGHT THERE IN THE CENTER OF IT ALL reporting from the fun-zone. Here's a full list of the shows and events:

Sketchfest NYC will run from June 8 – 11, 2011at The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre! Individual Tickets will cost $10, with nightly passes costing $40, and Full Festival Passes $100. Half priced tickets are also available with a valid current UCB student ID.Thirty-six different groups from around North America including theWhitest Kids U Know, Marvel Comics, and The Rejection Show, will converge on The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. Each night, New York audiences will experience the absolute best sketch comedy from around the United States.

This year's festival features some very special exclusive performances!

Whitest Kids U Know -- The sketch group began in 2000 at New York's School of Visual Arts. After college the group set up shop at the Lower East Side bar Pianos. They performed weekly shows until 2006 when they sold their sketch show to the cable network Fuse. Their fifth and final season can now be seen on IFC. The Whitest Kids will be performing a rare live show, as well as a panel moderated by Steve Heisler from the Onion AV Club looking back at five years of their TV show.

URDB - Live! -- An open platform for world records, built on a belief that everyone can be the world's best at something. Launched in 2008, the site hosts over 6,000 user-generated records submitted from 50+ countries. Named "Best Oddball Night" by New York Magazine, their live events have featured records set by the likes of Reggie Watts, Morgan Murphy, AJ Jacobs, Arden Myrin, Mark Malkoff, Jon Friedman and M. Doughty.

Channel 101 -- At Channel 101, the destiny of TV entertainment is in your hands! During this monthly screening, new five-minute mini-TV shows from the best comedians and filmmakers in NYC battle it out for the right to be turned into a series. The top five shows become the new "prime time" lineup for the following month; losing shows are canceled! Wouldn't it be great if all television worked this way? Come vote for your favorite!

The Rejection Show -- A comedic based event that embraces the rejected and "turned down" material of writers, comedians, cartoonists, artists, and other artistic types whom display their creative and personal "failures" live on stage. This year, The Rejection Show will present the audience favorite ‘Sketchfest NYC Closing Night Craptacular’, whereSketchfest NYC groups present their most ridiculous and outrageous sketches.

Comedy Central Digital Showcase -- Matt McCarthy hosts this session of delight featuring videos from Sidecar Comedy, The Selwyn Brothers, Rachel Feinstein, new tech talk-show "The Download" hosted by Jordan Rubin and Molly McAleer, and the premiere of "Kid Farm," starring Pete Holmes as the father of one of those giganto freakshow TLC families.

Secret Screening – It’s not so secret if we tell you about it, but trust us, this is a film premiere you won’t want to miss!

Let's just call Emily Tarver what she is -- Ms. America -- because this woman is straight-up national. I imagine every time she walks into a holding room for a commercial audition, everybody just lets out an audible sigh because they know damn well she's gonna book that shit. And they know this because she's so g.d. good at it. I mean, remember the last time I featured Ms. Tarver here in a Double Shot?

This one is for Lowe's. Lowe's! ... Lowe's!

ASK FOR IT BY NAME: CRAIG BALDO FOR FULLERTON FORD

I like this commercial a lot. And not only because comedian Craig Baldo is in it. I like it because despite its best effort to "go meta," it winds up with some inexplicable flaws: How do Tom's grocery bags disintegrate so quickly? How does Craig's tapping Tom's shoulder cause the bag to rip apart? And how does that cause the milk and egg cartons to rupture, and presumably also break open a bag of M&Ms? Maybe I'm thinking too much here. Probably because I will never be able to afford a car.

If Spike Jonze was filming this, I doubt it was just a one-off thing. I mean, it probably is one-off in the sense that there likely won't be a tour (at least not right now), but not a one-off in that this probably isn't the first we will hear of Modern Weepers. If I had to guess, it seems like they're testing the waters for a new schtick (aka Austin Powers, Love Guru, etc) that they can use in a future film or other project.

The zany people cruising aboard the S.S. Wasp make a wrong turn in the Nantucket Sound and end up at The UCBT in The Brooks Brothers Memorial Day Clambake, a character showcase hosted by Mike Schell and Alex Scordelis.

NOTES

--Justin Purnell bestowed one lucky RANDOM AUDIENCE MEMBER with an onstage lobster dinner for playing "Which Zip Code is Better?" From my angle, it looked like the lobster could've used a little butter.

--As members of the National Inbreeding Group, Anthony Atamanuik and John Gemberling advocated family trees "in the form of straight lines" and riffed on the unusual sexual practices they're in favor of ("babies 69-ing"). Naturally, all this inbreeding has caused unforeseen mutations--John has gills! The bit then rollicked into unhinged madness, resulting in Anthony doubling over in convulsions, giving birth to a bloody egg as John fertilized it with his "mouth semen." They were both then punched out by Shannon O'Neil, who sat there with oversized boxing gloves, tasked with sacking anyone if their bits went over 4 minutes.

--Wearing a circus tent for an outfit, Julie Klausner played the ghost of Elaine Kaufman, the noted NYC restaurateur whose restaurant to the stars was recently closed. She described all the bold faced names she's fucking in heaven (i.e. Hitler and Yassir Arafat) and gave updates on the deceased, "Elizabeth Edwards and Patrick Swayze are an item." "This one's for the Cindy Adamses in the room," she said, before rattling off more racy tidbits about other newly dead celebs. Only in New York, kids!

Cody Lindquist and Charlie Todd

Julie Klausner as the ghost of Elaine Kaufman

Lydia Hensler teaches self defense for waspy women as David Bluvband looks on with approval.

Chris Schell and Alex Scordelis as the hosts of this clambake, The Brooks Brothers